Great News! Polls Show Climate Change Scare is Over!

Great News! Polls Show Climate Change Scare is Over!

Climate Change itself, however, is as bad as ever

The National Post’sDenier-in-Chief Lawrence Solomon has weighed in again with an irrelevant and inaccurate celebration that, in the U.S. at least, people are becoming LESS concerned about climate change.

Of course, Solomon didn’t offer any actual evidence for this contention, other than vague references to unspecified public opinion polls. His strongest source was this: “Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.”

As for actual climate change science - apparently of little interest to Solomon or his readers - he offered no sources whatever. Instead, he repeated the denier talking points (“Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme.”), ignoring such actual evidence as the new Nature article warning that Antarctic ice is, in fact, declining at historic rates, or the latest warning from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

This kind of detail doesn’t traditionally appeal to Solomon, who wrote a whole book, called The Deniers, even though he admitted on page 45 of that tract that he had not found a single scientist - anywhere - who actually denied that humans are warming the earth in a dangerous way.

Now he would like us to cheer that the climate change denial campaign is (apparently - still no actual evidence here) having its desired effect and that people are worrying less.

Let’s imagine, just this once, that Solomon might actually be correct. People are worrying less. They are less enthusiastic about government taking action on an historic environmental threat. Government, irresponsible governments at least, might therefore be less inclined to take action. That’s great, for the oil industry flaks who likely sponsored Solomon’s book. What about the rest of us?

Let’s imagine, too, that someone came along and said: Great news! People are no longer afraid of AIDS.

Fabulous! One less thing to get anxious about. Unless, of course, AIDS is still a risk. (And the last time I checked ….)

What Solomon is really saying is: Live dangerously. That’s stupid advice when it comes from a drunk 17-year-old. It’s hard to imagine how a grown (and presumably sober) man could find it otherwise.

So the Philippines should stop being alarmed because they are getting zapped by more and worse typhoons?

http://alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP511031.htm 30-sep-09:

About 20 typhoons hit the Philippines annually and Alvarez said wind speeds have increased over the past 30 years.
“It’s been ranging initially about 30 years ago, 100 kilometre-per-hour storms. It’s been growing in aggressiveness from 100 to 150 and of late, the storms have been close to 200 kilometre per hour.”
Despite the relatively mild velocity of Ketsana it carried heavy rains. Experts say more intense rains are an expected effect of global warming.”

They are raising hell in the UN climate talks about cutting emissions, because they believe the global alarmists. Tsk, tsk. And they did this before Typhoon Parma struck – some people scare easy. Wusses.

A bad trend of storms is comparable to a 10 year cooling trend. It’s tempting to point to it but you’re getting into a nebulous area. The thing about climate is it’s too boring and takes too long to see a real trend so we all look at the noise and say “look at that”

Can’t let that go - the minute you say “look at the storms in the Phillipines”, you invite the reminder that we’ve had nothing in the Atlantic this year. - It’s all just noise.

Just thought I’d bring readers’ attention to a brilliant new paper by Richard Lindzen. For those who don’t read past the usual “Denier” smears, Pofessor Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and has over 200 peer-reviewed papers.
(http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/PublicationsRSL.html).

In his new paper “On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data”,

… why temp has already risen by 0.8 degrees from pre-industrial.
Oh, no. Sorry. It won’t. It doesn’t explain that at all.
But I can take a shot at why Lindzen is still the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, despite his drift into stumping full-time for climate confusion: tenure.

What were we thinking Richard? We should take the word of a hack weatherman* checking weather stations in one country, over the decades of scientific research carried out by bona fide scientists world wide. That makes just about as much sense as determining the accuracy of scientific results by puplic opinion poll. Oh – wait,

See a pattern here?
http://www.ianschumacher.com/img/ice_ages.png
See where we were supposed to be going?

Notice we are currently going UP?

Oh, and Watts’ supposed “UHI” isn’t visible in the records. NOAA has actually done the number crunching and found that taking Watts’ 70 or so “good” stations show the SAME upward trend as the whole dataset (of which most supposedly are so bad). This means your requested analysis has been done, and Watts’ claims have no basis.

There are seventy common arguments put forward by denialists. It is clear that a number of these are in stark contradiction with others. e.g. 1 and 69; which contradict each other and 9; 20; 28 ;56 and so-on.

All of the challenges above should have caused the warmists to look elsewhere for explainations, but they didn’t(that is the problem with religion.. you get dogmatic, and instead start to ask for “punishment” of deniers!). So it is up to others:

In case you haven’t noticed, many papers are coming out, which totally discount CO2 as the main driver of Global Warming.

The science has moved on.

I particularly am looking forward to the impact of the connection between Cosmic radiation and the earths temperature. It has been nearly 10 years in the making ..

Now we have cloud experiments underway to develop a model:

CERN experiment looks at cosmic rays, clouds and climate

CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) is a novel experiment at CERN conducted by an interdisciplinary team of leading scientists from 18 institutes in 9 countries. The goal is to investigate the possible influence of galactic cosmic rays on Earth’s clouds and climate, by studying the microphysical interactions involved. This is the first time a high energy physics accelerator is being used to study atmospheric and climate science.

EdB,
“The science has moved on” almost word for word what I retorted to you only yesterday [Tue, 2009-10-06 14:04], when you were prattling-on about Rasool and Schneider from July 1971, a paper that’s 38 years old!
[Dishonest EdB is Lying Again - What a surprise!http://www.desmogblog.com/apple-quits-us-chamber-commerce-over-climate ]

[EdB quote]
In case you haven’t noticed, many papers are coming out, which totally discount CO2 as the main driver of Global Warming. [endquote]

Coming from a self-declared expert like EdB, this is of course a deliberate, barefaced lie. The radiative physics of CO2 haven’t gone away. Which also means that any ‘new’ mechanisms are going to be minor in magnitude, when compared with the effect of CO2.

The National Post and American Thinker? Not a peer-review in sight. You’ll have to do a lot better than that. The American Thinker article is a tired rehash of things that have been churning through the denialsphere for YEARS, oblivious to the fact that it’s all been answered and debunked by the science.
The train has left the station, man. Get over it.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.